In 1977, Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall pointed to the need to reject economic reductionism in favor of paying “considerable attention to the ethnic, cultural and ideological factors which are at play” without abandoning a class analysis. In this course, we will aim to understand the evolving, varying, and oft-contradicting ways in which Marxian economists have theorized race and its implications both for understanding the capitalist system we live in and liberating ourselves from it. In the first part of the course, we will examine a variety of orthodox Marxist approaches to the linkages between race and class. These will include frameworks that oppose a ‘particularity’ of race to a universality of class (David Harvey) and those that treat race as a legacy of pre-capitalist societies (Ellen Meiksins Wood), both of which understand race as a divide-and-conquer tool of the ruling class. We will find that much of contemporary Marxian economic thought is absent an adequate account of racial subordination and its operation as part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production. In the latter half of the course, we will utilize Hall’s concept of articulation to reassess the role of non-class social structures of subordination in the reproduction of the capitalist system. We will focus in particular on theories of the social nature of the determination of the value of labor: how might race and other social constructions of difference mediate economic value-making? Moreover, how does such mediation change the way we understand the economic import of race? Throughout the course, we will aim for what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms ‘organic praxis’: building knowledge that can inform—and is informed by—ground struggle.